Desmond is a software package developed at D. E. Shaw Research to perform high-speed molecular dynamics simulations of biological systems on conventional computer clusters.
[1][2][3][4] The code uses novel parallel algorithms[5] and numerical methods[6] to achieve high performance on platforms containing multiple processors,[7] but may also be executed on a single computer.
The core and source code are available at no cost for non-commercial use by universities and other not-for-profit research institutions, and have been used in the Folding@home distributed computing project.
Along with the molecular dynamics program, the Desmond software also includes tools for minimizing and energy analysis, both of which can be run efficiently in a parallel environment.
[11] It currently supports several versions of the CHARMM, Amber and OPLS force fields, and a range of different water models.